Friday, December 18, 2015

New Guidelines for Hypertension Care

If you or your company are in the business of population health management and your service portfolio includes high blood pressure, you need to download this report. The JNC 8 Guidelines have been released on-line in JAMA.

They are the best summary that expert science has to offer on the state-of-the-art treatment for hypertension. There are new thresholds for treatment, new targets that define success and new recommendations on which anti-hypertensives to try first.

Stakeholders interested in promoting non-medication treatment options may come away disappointed. After reading through this once, the Disease Management Care Blog found very little in the guidelines on "lifestyle" The authors instead decided to briefly endorse a separate set of lifestyle guidelines that can be found here. Good for them.

Aside from a few nods to the topic, the JNC 8 authors just didn't have the time or take the effort. Maybe the JAMA editors didn't have enough space in the journal to include a few paragraphs on the importance of promoting medication adherence.

Pity.

That's OK, though, because the millions of persons already involved in care management programs nationwide are already being cared for by professionals who are already aware of that need.

Coda: A next step for JNC 8: getting docs to pay attention to them. More on that here.